During the past 20 years, the continued evolution of computer processors, data-storage devices and subsystems, and networking, together with the emergence of the World Wide Web and broad consumer acceptance of the Internet, have created a vast new Internet-based retailing infrastructure that represents a significant portion of current retail transactions for products and services. In certain retail sectors, including books and recorded music, Internet-based retail transactions now rival or have surpassed traditional retailing media, including physical retail establishments and catalog-based mail-order and telephone transactions. It is expected that Internet-based retailing will continue to grow and assume increasingly greater shares of the total retail-transaction volumes on a worldwide basis, including retailing of products and goods as well as retailing of services, and including commercial activities of many different types of industries and commercial organization, including financial services providers, travel services, and healthcare.
As Internet-based retailing of products and services has evolved and increased in market share, a variety of new support industries have grown up around Internet-based retailing, including cloud computing, website-development services, Internet-transaction services, automated testing and optimization services, and web-analytics services. Automated data-collection-and-data-processing, testing, and optimization services provide tools and infrastructure to allow owners and managers of websites to carry out experiments in which websites are systematically instrumented in order to generate data from which the automated testing and optimization services determine salient features and characteristics of websites, remote users, markets, and other entities involved in online activities. The results of analysis of the data generated by instrumentation guide modification of websites to improve website users' experiences and website owner's returns on investment. Existing automated data-collection-and-data-processing, testing, and optimization services may, however, be seriously challenged by the volume and complexity of the data generated by instrumented web pages. Organizations involved in data-collection and data-processing from instrumented computational entities, web-site testing, web-site optimization, and other data-driven activities seek methods and systems to facilitate extraction of information from instrumentation-generated data and other types of data collected by data-collection-and-data-processing systems and services. In particular, organizations involved in data-collection and data-processing from instrumented computational entities, web-site testing, web-site optimization, and other data-driven activities seek methods and systems to predict and forecast online activities based on information extracted from instrumentation-generated data and other types of data collected by data-collection-and-data-processing systems and services